By Mallory Mattingly
Oxford University Press crowned rage bait 2025’s word of the year, and it totally epitomizes the state of the internet today.
“Rage Bait” refers to “online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted in order to increase traffic to or engagement with a particular web page or social media content,” the Oxford University Press defined.
This kind of content is unsurprisingly quite popular.
Related: What Is ‘Brain Rot’? Oxford’s Word of the Year Highlights Social Media Epidemic
“The person producing it will bask in the millions, quite often, of comments and shares and even likes sometimes,’’ lexicographer Susie Dent said in an interview with the BBC, per NBC News. It’s viewership soars as a result of algorithms, “because although we love fluffy cats, we’ll appreciate that we tend to engage more with negative content and content that really provokes us.”
Though it seems like a more recent term, rage bait first appeared in 2002 to describe a driver’s reaction to being flashed by another driver who wants to pass them, “introducing the idea of deliberate agitation.” It quickly evolved into an internet term to describe inflammatory content “designed to elicit anger by being frustrating, offensive, or deliberately divisive in nature.”
It beat out aura farming and biohack, which were other contenders for this year.
“As technology and artificial intelligence become ever more embedded into our daily lives — from deepfake celebrities and AI-generated influencers to virtual companions and dating platforms — there’s no denying that 2025 has been a year defined by questions around who we truly are; both online and offline,” Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Languages, said of the term.
“The fact that the word rage bait exists and has seen such a dramatic surge in usage means we’re increasingly aware of the manipulation tactics we can be drawn into online,” he continued. “Before, the internet was focused on grabbing our attention by sparking curiosity in exchange for clicks, but now we’ve seen a dramatic shift to it hijacking and influencing our emotions, and how we respond. It feels like the natural progression in an ongoing conversation about what it means to be human in a tech-driven world — and the extremes of online culture.”
“Where last year’s choice, brain rot, captured the mental drain of endless scrolling, rage bait shines a light on the content purposefully engineered to spark outrage and drive clicks,” he concluded. “And together, they form a powerful cycle where outrage sparks engagement, algorithms amplify it, and constant exposure leaves us mentally exhausted. These words don’t just define trends; they reveal how digital platforms are reshaping our thinking and behaviour.”
The dominance of rage bait should prompt us to pause and consider how the content we consume on social media impacts us and the world.
Read Next: Adults Spend Nearly Two Decades Online. Here’s How To Cut Back.
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